The Mother Road
Route 66, the mother road, runs alongside Interstate Highway 40 as it crosses the country east to west. In my teens and early twenties I came to know 66 while going back and forth between Chicago and LA, traveling by car, bus and thumb. It was two lanes of asphalt then, carrying us through endless Midwest farmland, slowly giving way to the desert and its old west culture before we finally crossed the Colorado River into the palm tree’d wonders of California. It was thousands of miles filled with adventure and discovery for a green Chicago kid.
Traveling the road now, I glimpse the things I once saw fresh. Aged by time and removed from the present they take me back, and open the storerooms of my memory.
— Andy Romanoff, Los Angeles
